


when i am king you shall be queen

by batyatoon



Series: lavender's green, lavender's blue [1]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Community: purimgifts, F/M, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 00:33:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6262258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/pseuds/batyatoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Narnia is very different from Ramandu's Island.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when i am king you shall be queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [noxelementalist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noxelementalist/gifts).



> (The movie adaptations have given Ramandu's Daughter the name "Lilliandil", which sounds rather more faux-Tolkien than Lewis to me. I went with something different.)

King Caspian's wife, Queen Istra daughter of Ramandu, is always careful to teach her young son Prince Rilian no more than what any royal child of Narnia should know of the stars. Alambil the Lady of Peace, for instance, will only ever be a bright point in the night sky to him -- never the tall and lovely woman Istra distantly remembers, warm smile and gentle eyes, grace immeasurable in the dance.

(She has always remembered things that her father knew, from time to time, things that she is quite sure he never told her. She wonders if Rilian will remember fragments of her life the same way, and if he will learn to think of those memories as only dreams.)

She misses her father sometimes, and the quiet isle where they lived together for so long before Caspian came with his little ship; she misses the heavens where by right, if one looks at matters a certain way, she should be living now. Moving in her predestined sphere in the long slow-swift dance of her father's people, ever rising and setting at the appointed times, a star's bright-burning life of singing glory to the King. The island was, in its way, an earthly copy or imitation of that life, and one she knows she will never return to again.

This life, this land, in its chaotic asymmetrical beauty where nothing is ever repeated quite the same way twice … has its compensations.

It is not in the nature of stars to seek companionship, much less crowds: an approach near enough to touch hands might happen once in two hundred years, or two thousand, or never at all. Istra and her father were contented in their shared solitude, seeking no company but each other's, and for a short while she contemplates living much the same way with Caspian -- but it becomes clear, even on board ship, that such is not to be; he is too close to his people to ever live truly apart. And while she still loves the occasional hour or day of solitude, shared or otherwise, before a year has gone by she finds herself as much in love with the people of Narnia as with their king.

The people of Narnia begin as a constant astonishment to her, from the shyly eager birch-dryad who announces herself as Istra's maid to the stout dwarf Trumpkin -- who, when first presented to her, looks her up and down with a keen eye before doffing his cap, bowing with some difficulty, and gruffly pronouncing _You'll do, your Majesty_. Humans and Dwarfs and Talking Beasts, tree-people and water-people, centaurs and fauns and the odd gentle giant, all the court and the countrymen of Narnia: all eager to love her for their King's sake and then for her own, and each first fascinating to her and then dear beyond words. How wondrous, how splendid, that a place and a people should be so wildly different from her home and her father, and that there should be such joy in it.

Years pass, and they are still capable of astonishing her, every day; and Caspian no less than the rest. His reign is peaceful, busy and happy for the most part -- but even at the busiest times he will steal an hour or two for her, to take a basket lunch up to the highest tower of the castle or walk out along the river together. And at the times of greatest leisure he will take days at a time, to ride with her through forest and town and countryside as though to show her every littlest part of his kingdom and introduce her to every person in it. He brings her to meet his old tutor and his old nurse, his friends from the great uprising when he was a boy, and to each he presents her with warm pride: _And this -- this, of course, is my beloved Istra_.

All these moments, strange and new and beautiful, bright as the fire-berries she has never tasted. She wants to string them together in a chain to show her father, somehow, someday.

Stars are born, but never raised; they are never infants, even at their youngest, and they never have infant stars of their own. Rilian in his perfect smallness, waving tight-clenched tiny fists and bellowing his first dawn chorus in righteous anger at the mortal indignity of having been born, is the loveliest astonishment of all. Caspian holding their new son in his arms, his face softened to something ten years younger in that same bottomless surprise, is more: a miracle and a glory beyond anything the heavens will ever know.

* * *

  
  



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